Karsten Nohl
More info
- Affiliation
- Security Research Labs (Berlin)
- Known for
- Crypto-1, the A5/1 tables, the SIM card attack, BadUSB, SS7
German researcher who spent more than a decade showing that the infrastructure in our pockets runs on cryptography nobody had checked.
At the Chaos Communication Congress in 2007, Nohl and Henryk Plötz described how they had sanded down Mifare Classic chips and photographed the circuitry under a microscope to reconstruct the secret cipher Crypto-1, which protected access badges and transit tickets around the world. Two years later he launched a project to compute rainbow tables against A5/1, the cipher protecting GSM calls. The operators had long insisted the attack was theoretical.
In 2013 he showed that many SIM cards accepted over-the-air updates signed with crackable DES keys, and in 2014 came BadUSB: firmware on a USB stick that pretends to be a keyboard. The same year he demonstrated how the SS7 signalling network let anyone with carrier access track and eavesdrop on phones.